A Visual Ranking of Seattle Public Elementary Schools

One of the things people consistently tell me when they are
considering buying or renting a home in a new location is
that they want to move somewhere with “good schools.” This always makes
me wonder how we quantify what schools are
considered “good”? To start you might look for information on school
reputations or performance using local school data fact sheets from
realtors or apartment managers or, more likely, by searching ranking and
review sites such as
Niche.
This approach is generally fine but it assumes that you are only
interested in a specific neighborhood which may be difficult to achieve
right now in most major cities across the US and especially in
Seattle.

What if instead we looked at all the neighborhood school ratings in a
city simultaneously? This would
allow the reader to spot trends and make visual comparisons as well
as possibly identify overperforming schools in unexpected areas.
Fortunately, Seattle Public Schools (SPS) provides quite a lot of
data
about their schools which makes this easy to visualize.

Setup

For this analysis I just the SPS data for the 2016-17 school
year.

I focused solely on elementary school data for the 2016-17
school year. I used the SPS district boundary map for all public elementary
schools in the City of Seattle and ignored any magnet or alternative
elementary schools.

Rankings

Initially I focused on three questions:

What school has the best student/teacher ratio?

What school reports the best attendance?

What schools are best for reading and math?

I took the SPS data for student/teacher ratio, attendance rate, and reading and math
proficiency scores for each school and calculated their rank
within the city to make this table. Click on the category name to sort
by that category.

School Name

Attendance Rank

Student/Teacher Ratio Rank

Grade 3 Math Rank

Grade
3 Reading Rank

Adams

12

53

29

21

Alki

20

35

12

15

Arbor Heights

21

31

45

33

Gatzert

42

4

49

56

Beacon Hill Int’l

1

32.50

30

37

B.F. Day

16

43

25

23

Broadview-Thomson K-8

49

2

46

45

Bryant

6

55

3

4

Cascadia

2

59

1

1

Catharine Blaine K-8

38

15

6

13

Concord Int’l

44

22

59

60

Bagley

10

20

24

19

Dearborn Park Int’l

61

61

61

61

Dunlap

43

5

56

55

Emerson

58

14

43

53

Fairmount Park

22

47

2

3

Coe

9

48

10

9

Gatewood

35

26

33

40

Genesee Hill

24

50

16

20

Graham Hill

39

10

55

49

Green Lake

31

37

26

28

Greenwood

15

54

20

17

Hawthorne

46

16

48

41

Highland Park

48

6

57

50

Hay

8

38

19

10

John Muir

23

25

52

48

John Rogers

33

24

34

34

Kimball

30

32.50

40

36

Lafayette

29

44

27

25

Laurelhurst

34

49

15

24

Lawton

26

42

4

6

Leschi

53

36

37

44

Lowell

60

3

58

54

Loyal Heights

17

58

5

7

Madrona

52

1

47

43

Maple

19

28

31

32

MLK Jr.

45

8

54

58

McDonald International

7

30

23

2

McGilvra

25

40

14

11

Montlake

37

51

9

16

North Beach

14

46

13

12

Northgate

51

11

50

51

Olympic Hills

41

34

21

30

Olympic View

27

56

32

29

Queen Anne

28

57

28

22

Rainier View

55

21

18

26

Roxhill

56

13

53

57

Sacajawea

36

7

42

42

Sand Point

47

27

39

35

Sanislo

57

12

60

59

Stevens

32

29

35

31

Thornton Creek

18

17

41

38

Thurgood Marshall

5

39

8

18

Van Asselt

59

9

51

52

Viewlands

40

19

44

47

View Ridge

3

52

11

5

Wedgwood

11

41

7

14

West Seattle Elem

54

23

38

46

West Woodland

13

45

17

8

Whittier

4

60

22

27

Wing Luke

50

18

36

39

Schmitz Park

62

62

62

62

What jumps out at me most is that no particular school consistently
out-performs the others, which can make it challenging to decide what
to prioritize when choosing a school.

Student/Teacher ratio

Each school reports the number of enrolled students and the number of
teachers which I simply used to calculate a ratio.

Click on an attendance area for the exact percentage.

Attendance

I was initially interested in student attendance data, but the elementary
school with the
lowest daily attendance was Lowell Elementary with an attendance rate of
89%. Every other school reported an attendance rate at or
above 95% which did not make for a very interesting map. I later learned
that Washington State has a compulsory
attendance law
which likely affected these numbers.

Reading proficiency

I was interested in looking at district-wide third grade reading achievement scores district-wide
for 3rd
graders as measured by the Washington State proficiency
test. I
chose third grade because that is the first year a Washington State standardized test is
administered for reading.

Click on an attendance area for the exact percentage.

Math proficiency

Family engagement

SPS provides a parent survey with a variety of questions evaluating
parent enthusiasm and approval of Seattle schools. These survey results are not published, so I looked at how many families
completed these surveys for the 2016-17 school year.

Click on an attendance area for the exact percentage.

Even the school with the most responses reported that only 49.1% of families responded to the
survey which to me means that most families are satisfied with
their school but neither especially excited or disappointed by their school experiences.

tl;dr Choosing a school is hard but ultimately it comes down to how
satisfied the parents or guardians are with the school. Schools report
on a wide array of metrics about student performance,
but performance is often an issue of secondary importance when
compared to parents’ overall perception of the school quality.